Rumours Of The Heart

British playwright Lucy Prebble’s recent work, The Effect, which picked up the coveted London Critic’s Circle Theatre Award last year, puts love under the microscope, exploring the contentious crossover between neuroscience and emotion, between heart connection and Xanax. Actress Zahra Newman, part of MTC hits of last year, The Mountaintop and The Cherry Orchard, plays Connie, a test subject and love sceptic.

“The play is about the science of love, or the chemistry of love… I think,” Newman sighs. Two weeks into rehearsals and they’re still trying to piece together its complex cognitive balancing act. “It’s about how we delve into trying to understand the inexplicable parts of our brain that we don’t know anything about.”

The play is set in a four-week medical trial for anti-depressants, during which two of the participants – Connie is one of them – fall in love. As Newman says, the prevailing question of whether “this is just the drug working or whether it is a genuine feeling” hangs over every interaction. The question prompts us to ask of ourselves, as Newman does: “In real life, what is to say that it is not just chemicals that make you love someone, as opposed to some other mysterious thing?”

“I had a strong, visceral reaction to the play,” Newman says of her first reading. “It felt like it was mirroring where I was in my life and what I had just been through. Like the first scene, I felt like I had literally just had that conversation with my psychologist!”

Newman is finding that these personal connections she’s making are testament to the universality of the issues the play explores.

“The storyline that connects with me is one of love, and fear of love. Anyone would have a connection with that. It’s whether you’re willing to step off the cliff, or not and play it safe. What we’re discovering is that it is unknown. They can tell us what is going on in our brain, they can map people and scan them, and say, ‘This is the part of your brain that activates when you see the person that you love,’ but it doesn’t make any sense because all you feel is just that feeling towards the person.”

Joining Newman on stage are local favourites Sigrid Thornton and William McInnes, who play doctors running the trial. While Jamaican-born Newman didn’t grow up with episodes of SeaChange like the rest of us, she can appreciate the wealth of expertise the two actors bring: “They are really lovely, great and open. Just great, fun actors to have in the room.”

Prebble’s writing, meanwhile, feels like “a new way of writing realism that’s doing something different to television,” adds Newman. “The way that she handles language is very natural but also has the ability to be very poetic at the same time. It’s fluid, new, and challenging.”